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New restrictions hit clubs hard

Lower league clubs will be hit hard by the decision not to allow fans into matches, as they are particularly dependent on matchday revenue: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/54246745

Kieran Maguire of the PriceofFootball comments: 'National League clubs will be especially hit by the decision to not allow matches to take place before fans. Only 3 clubs out of 24 made a profit in 2018/19, and total losses were £318,000 a week across the division.'

Wrexham made the biggest profit (£755k) and Dover Athletic the biggest loss (£494k).

Streaming games is one (relatively small) source of income for clubs, but how it works does not constitute a level playing field.  Here is the chairman of Colchester United on the issue:

'The way it works currently is that the home team keep all of the revenue for the tickets they sell through their own website and they also get the revenue for the first 500 that buy via the away team. For example: for Saturday’s game against Bolton, we sold 452 iFollow passes, (so we keep all of the revenue from those), and Bolton sold 2252 iFollow passes, (of which we get the revenue from the first 500).

This has put a very new aspect on the revenue that is available to clubs this season. Bolton made more money in gate receipts from our home fixture than we did because they had the revenue from 1,752 iFollow passes whereas we had the revenue from 952 iFollow passes. In normal times, we would have expected about £54,000 in home gate receipts from this fixture but we will receive just shy of £8,000, whereas Bolton would have expected about £600 for the 5% commission we pay them but will have received about £14,000 more than that.

We sold just over 300 streams for the away game against Bradford, so we earnt £0.00 for that away game and I expect that to be the case for every away game this season. So based on twenty three away games, Bolton look set to receive about £345,000 from the streaming of their away games this season whilst we can look forward to approximately £0.00.'

A note of caution: it may be that League One operates a different model to League Two based on historical away attendances.  The Championship model may be different again.

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